Building a seaport in the Gaza Strip: prospects, challenges and opportunities

By Omar Shaban

A seaport in Gaza would constitute not only a necessary economic and developmental leap for Palestine, but an expression of its unity and sovereignty. To achieve it, several options are available, each with its own unique set of challenges and opportunities.

Talk of a Gaza seaport may seem unrealistic under the political, economic, and social circumstances surrounding the Palestinian cause internally and internationally — particularly since the building of any port is governed less by economic considerations than by political and security dimensions, above all the question of Palestinian sovereignty amid the internal division and the halt of the negotiation process between Israel and Palestine. The restrictions imposed on economic development likewise prevent most international parties — and even Palestinians, including their private sector — from pumping money into the productive sectors in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The best-laid development plans, especially in the Gaza Strip, will keep failing so long as Palestinians are denied access to their land and natural resources, and barred from building ports to conduct even the smallest measure of commercial and economic activity — especially since the international parties have busied themselves less with addressing the restrictions imposed by the occupying state than with managing the fallout of the recurrent violence between Israel and Gaza or the West Bank: attempts to cool the atmosphere and pump in humanitarian-aid money, or reconstruction through indirect, slow, and costly mechanisms designed to avoid involving or dealing with Hamas — which allows Israel to block the entry of materials and equipment into Gaza — or through the so-called Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism led by the United Nations since 2014, which grants Israel a security veto over every good. Economic development has thus become hostage to Israeli security concerns, regardless of the consequences for the health and welfare of Gaza's population.

The imposed Israeli complications and their mounting economic effects have become a pressing obstacle facing the world, requiring swift movement and a re-telling of the political narrative — including a return to talk of the port, and the replacement of the old mechanism with another that gathers the major stakeholders and affirms Palestinian ownership of the process. Palestinians never suffer any shortage of ideas about how to invest the resources available to them, limited though they are, and how to create a development vision, paired with a time horizon, for the lands they administer, to ease their lives and improve their economic conditions.

In the context of the hard circumstances the Gaza Strip lives through, talk should return to the possibilities of building the port as one of the economic tributaries amid the cloud of economic solutions looming on the horizon — because Palestinians need far more than humanitarian aid to achieve stability over the long term. They need a sustainable development plan, the capacity to trade, work opportunities, and the treatment of the environmental damage caused by successive Israeli bombardments — to say nothing of the problems of drinking water and sanitation services.

From an accepted idea to a stalled construction

Palestinians view the building of a port in Gaza as one of the foundations of national independence on the road to establishing the Palestinian state; it is also an important economic lever, because Gaza needs means of transport for import and export. The Palestinians' political ambition consists essentially of sovereignty, independence, and better living conditions: the principal driver for building a port is “political/economic”. A Palestinian port would deliver services to all Palestinians across the governorates, serve the Palestinian territories as a whole, and be connected to the network of other ports and land crossings — which demands a study of Palestinian needs in building the port for commercial and humanitarian transport.

Before 1967 Gaza had a port through which it exported and imported what it needed. The question of building a port and airport in Gaza was raised in the settlement process — in the Oslo accord of 1993 and the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement of 1999, where it was agreed to begin implementation under the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement signed in September 1999.

Despite the multiplicity of proposals, Israel across the past years has given no official approval for a port in Gaza except in the agreements signed at Oslo 1993 and Sharm el-Sheikh 1999. Those agreements were followed by government measures and decrees to organise the port's construction and management: the Palestinian Sea Ports Authority was created by presidential decision No. (47) of 1999, then presidential decree No. (1) of 30 April 2000 was issued to build a port in Gaza under the Sea Ports Authority, whose mandate is to provide an efficient, high-capacity maritime transport system in Palestine through building, managing, and operating maritime facilities including commercial, tourist, and fishing seaports.

At the start of 2000 the Palestinian Authority began building a small seaport in the middle of Gaza City with European funding, but Israel bombed and destroyed the port site in the second intifada — only three months after construction began. The Palestinian Authority then resumed building after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, on the strength of the “Crossings Agreement of 2005”, which contained a clause stipulating that the port would not be destroyed again.

Nevertheless, the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip after Hamas won the second legislative elections in 2006, and then the Palestinian division of 2007 — when Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and the Authority's reach receded to the West Bank governorates — halted the Palestinian development process in every field, port construction included. In light of deteriorating economic conditions and the escalation of conflict and Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip across those years, talk returned once more to a port in Gaza, whether to break the blockade or in an attempt to improve economic conditions in a Strip suffering unprecedented unemployment — 50% in 2021, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Given the continuing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and the repeated assaults since 2008, Hamas demanded in the ceasefire negotiations after the 2014 assault on Gaza the establishment of the Gaza port, but Israel rejected the idea entirely. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Al Jazeera: “The Israeli reply the Palestinian delegation received through the Egyptian side contained no mention of the commercial port Palestinians demand to build, nor of the airport they demand be activated.” Talk then began to widen about rebuilding the port in the Gaza Strip, and multiple proposals emerged.

The Israeli refusal rests fundamentally on the security element — even though achieving security requires reducing the conflict and improving Palestinians' economic conditions, not the reverse. The refusal also serves to keep Palestinians dependent on Israeli ports, especially for bulk goods that require major ports to move.

Options for moving forward

A set of alternatives has been floated in academic and political circles for reactivating a “waterway” for the Gaza Strip. The question of the Gaza port is bound up with the Strip's crossings and outlets — the Rafah land crossing, the port, and the airport. But given where Palestinian conditions and regional considerations have arrived, talk turned to alternative solutions for providing the Gaza Strip with a sea outlet in place of the Gaza port. The idea was floated of erecting an artificial island off Gaza's coast to host a port and airport — originally an idea of the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, later adopted by the former Israeli transport minister Yisrael Katz.

The Israeli government, however, rejected the proposal to build a port off Gaza's coast on 5 August 2016, on security grounds. Hamas's reply came from the then deputy head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who described the building of a port in Gaza as “an inherent right of our Palestinian people” that should have been realised after the assault stopped in 2014.

For its part, the Ports Authority of the Palestinian Authority announced it was studying proposals to use the port of El-Arish as a temporary port and to create maritime transport lines between El-Arish and the fishermen's wharf in Gaza — dispensing with the use of Israeli ports, which impose exorbitant costs on the Palestinian National Authority that weigh on the growth and development of the trade sector in the Palestinian areas.

The Israeli government revisited the port idea after the succession of security, political, and economic events in Gaza in 2018: the former Israeli defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, discussed on his visit to Cyprus the idea of a sea bridge from Cyprus to Gaza on 21 June 2018.

Proposals then followed one another, among them the “spatial vision for the Gaza governorates”, centred on economic benchmarks by 2050, which put forward 70 stimulus projects including the idea of a “floating port”, to confront the challenges set out in the UN report (Gaza unliveable by 2020).

According to the Ports Authority, the Palestinian Authority has studied all the alternatives on the table but has given no official statement about them; nor have decision-makers presented those propositions in any formal offer. Given the very small size of the Gaza Strip (362 square kilometres), the enormous population density, the limited farmland, and the environmental repercussions of building a port, the proposals can be discussed under four principal headings: building a port in the Gaza Strip; creating maritime lines; leasing a berth in an existing port; or building an artificial island off Gaza's coast.

A port could be built in the centre, north, or south of the Strip, and Palestinians would accept its construction wherever it stands so long as it delivers the economic interests and maritime sovereignty — especially if construction resumed on the port stipulated in the Oslo accords of 1993 and Sharm el-Sheikh of 1999. That proposal enjoys international acceptance and funding.

Israel does not wish to build or move the port forward, under its security pretexts and the developments of the Palestinian political situation. And although a port in the north would ease the Israeli security grip, it would cause Israel environmental problems, coastal erosion especially.

As for maritime lines, they are political lines more than economic ones — temporary solutions that deliver no economic development as a port would. Though they zero out the environmental and geographic problems, they require international approvals and security guarantees. Israel floated the idea of a Cyprus–Gaza sea line, with the port built in Cyprus and goods carried by ship to Gaza — implying its approval in principle, though the idea has not yet turned into a political proposition.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has objected to creating a sea corridor so long as it is a temporary solution until construction of the seaport resumes. Along similar lines, the Palestinian prime minister's council presented a proposal to study the possibility of creating a sea corridor “between the Gaza port and the nearest Turkish port” under Turkish sponsorship and supervision.

As for leasing a sea berth, the options are either in Egypt or in Israel — and this remains an essentially temporary solution that does not answer the need to build a port in the Gaza Strip and expand it to cover commercial and humanitarian transport.

Israel might accept leasing a berth in the port of Ashdod, since it satisfies its security requirements and carries no environmental or geographic harm — the port already exists — but it would not accept Palestinian management of it. Moreover, leasing would deliver neither the political nor the economic aspirations of Palestinians, and would carry exorbitant land- and sea-transport fees through Israel.

Egypt, on the other hand — holder of the only land outlet with Gaza, currently engaging with Gaza's humanitarian needs — might agree to the proposal, which enjoys the acceptance of Palestinians who studied the project before. It would not conflict with their aspirations, being a temporary solution; it would yield material returns for Egyptians and Palestinians alike, and would save the high transport costs from the port of Ashdod, with no new environmental or geographic problems — the port already exists. The Israeli position might be positive within international and security arrangements. For the project to succeed there must be regional consensus, a political solution, and the Palestinian Authority's approval.

The idea of building an island in the sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip to host “the port and the airport” is, from the environmental, geographic, and operational standpoints, among the best ideas on the table — but its costs are very high indeed; add to that the political and security dilemma Israel might impose, for the island would stand in Palestinian territory while operational and security control would be Israeli.

Any solution will need political endorsement among the principal parties, ending in an international agreement — because the port is not merely an economic project but an expression of national sovereignty and operational government administration. Ships and carriers move according to international regimes, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, the IMO Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic (FAL) of 1965, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the other international agreements governing international trade at sea — regimes that could qualify Palestinians to run the port globally. The Ports Authority continues to pursue Palestine's accession to the International Maritime Organization, so as to guarantee the development and growth of the maritime-transport sector in the Palestinian areas. This raises a question about Gaza's capacity to operate the port internationally, at a time when the Palestinian Authority may reject any proposal that would secure coexistence between Hamas-ruled Gaza and Israel without a political solution. In that light, the divergence of Palestinian visions leaves all parties unable to move forward in building and operating the port — which is precisely what Israel tries to market internationally.

Building the port serves everyone's interest

In general, seaports between neighbouring states arise through international understandings and agreements: the port project is a matter of construction and equally a matter of operation. Given the particularity of the Palestinian case, the port and airport question was raised within the political solution and made subject to bilateral agreements. Reactivating those agreements is the realistic alternative — especially since the European funding is already earmarked, and the construction cost does not exceed ($200 million), compared with the high costs of erecting a floating port at sea, estimated at ($7 to $10 billion). Who would bear the costs of construction, given the decline in financial support for the Palestinian people?

Security concerns may themselves be a gateway to resuming construction: without meeting the economic requirements, the political situation will remain in crisis. Resuming construction is a Palestinian priority for what the port would deliver in reducing the high costs of transport. Between 700 and 1,000 trucks currently enter the Gaza Strip each month; a Palestinian port would cut their transport costs and bank the savings for the Palestinian economy — Gaza imports all its requirements and needs from abroad. Cutting import costs supports the economy on one hand and creates employment on the other, which could bring down the high unemployment rates. Building the port would thus produce a leap in the Palestinian economy as a whole. The solution, then, remains fundamentally political, because Israel's security complications defeat every alternative on the table — and the first attempts to resume the port's construction begin with reactivating the international agreements, which are the guarantor of the port's international operation.

Under the continuation of the current conditions — the political division — one of the temporary solutions could be relied upon under UN and international sponsorship to confront the Israeli refusal, which would change the prevailing pattern of thought in Palestinian politics. “Building the port and maximising the economic gains” would push all parties toward the shared interests that can be realised for the benefit of the Palestinian people.

Building the Gaza port is an important factor in easing the humanitarian crises of the Gaza Strip, which are a fundamental cause of the tension and the many wars between Israel and the Palestinian organisations. A port in Gaza would be a powerful incentive for Palestinian reconciliation, since the interests of both sides of the Palestinian division could be met. A port in Gaza could have international organisations share in its management and supervision, as was the case when the Rafah crossing hosted a European monitoring mission to provide security guarantees for all parties. A port in Gaza should not wait for Palestinian reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank to be achieved — it should be the incentive for it. A new perspective must be adopted: a port in Gaza would be an important factor for stability, development, and peace in the region.

Note:

The article was published in English on the website of The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.